Juneteenth
As we celebrate the Second Independence Day, here are some great reads about the people who recognized America's great sin and acted
A 1900 Texas Emancipation Day celebration in Austin, Texas. Photo credit: Grace Murray Stephenson/Wikimedia Commons
On June 2, 1865, federal troops under the command of Major General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston, Texas to accept the surrender of Confederate troops in the state. They were the last rebels still under arms. It was almost eight weeks since Robert E. Lee had surrendered his troops to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia; as importantly, it was over two years since January 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, legally freeing 3.5 million enslaved people living in insurrectionist states.
But Lincoln’s action had limits. A war measure, the Proclamation did not apply to slaveholding states that had remained in the Union. African Americans were not emancipated in Delaware and Kentucky until December 1865, when a sufficient number of states ratified the 13th amendment. And even after that, a few people remained unfree in New Jersey. A rat’s nest of Confederate sympathizers known as Copperheads, the state had technically abolished slavery in 1804. But, like some other Northern states, “emancipation” was so gradual as to mean lifelong indenture and decades of “apprenticeship.” New Jersey belatedly added itself to the list of states ratifying the 13th amendment in 1866.
Furthermore, because of Southern censorship, enforced illiteracy, and the planter class’s greed, in the 30 months between the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, enslaved people often learned they were free only when federal troops arrived on the doorstep. Thus, in June, 1865, few to none of the 250,000 African Americans enslaved in Texas knew that their bondage was over, or even that the South had lost the war. On June 19, General Granger ordered that the law be enforced in Texas; federal soldiers, including several regiments of United States Colored Troops, marched across the state in the ensuing weeks to enforce the order.
Emancipation took years, and enslavement survived the war. But it is June 19th that, as the National Museum of African American History and Culture puts it, we honor as the “second Independence Day.” Celebrated by Black civic organizations and private citizens for over a century, Congress passed a bill making Juneteenth a legal federal holiday in 2021, and President Joe Biden signed it on June 18. The Senate approved the bill unanimously: you can find the names of the 14 House Republicans who voted against recognizing this turning point in American history here.
Today we celebrate freedom, but unlike July 4, June 19 asks us to contemplate why the United States was built, and thrived, on unfreedom; what the cost of that unfreedom was, and the heroism and spiritual commitment that it required for a people to survive generations of violence. This takes more than a day: it requires reading throughout the year, and it also requires dealing forthrightly with the everyday cruelty that made slavery possible.
So, let me offer up a few books that are unflinching in portraying this history. I guarantee you: all these books are both scholarly (even the novels!) and beautifully written.
Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (W.W. Norton, 1996). There are several biographies of Truth, as well as an 1850 autobiography dictated to Olive Gilbert. Painter’s work is distinguished for its readability, for correcting common misapprehensions about Truth introduced by Gilbert, and for the biographer’s attention to what we can and cannot know about a legendary figure who left virtually no archive. Readers who want more may also want to turn to a podcast I did with Nell about her latest collection of essays, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays (Doubleday, 2024).
Kerri Greenidge, The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022.) In the only book that brings together the entire Grimké family, Black and White, Greenidge offers a complex portrait of a family split between abolition and enslavement. She was also one of my first podcast guests; we talk about the book here.
There are numerous biographies of John Brown, one by abolitionist and formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass, who actually knew the man. But Brown has captured the imagination of novelists too. I recommend James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books, 2013), a narrative told from the perspective of an African American child who disguises himself as a girl to survive. My other favorite fictional rendition of the Brown story is Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter (Riverhead, 1998).
Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) tells the story of how ordinary African American people fought for their rights in the nation’s courts before Emancipation. Jones has recently become more well-known by general readers for Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic, 2020), a collection of biographies about how African American women fought for the vote. But Birthright Citizens is, at its core, about how a country of laws
Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024.) This is the only book I am recommending to you that I have not yet read, as it hasn’t yet arrived. But since I have loved every other book this prize-winning author has written, how could it not be great? I featured Miles’s fictional account of Black women reckoning with slavery’s legacy, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (Random House, 2023; orig. 2015) in a podcast, and while it sounds weird to say that a novel of such gravity is also an excellent vacation read, take my word for it—it is. By the way? Tiya is also a fellow Substacker.
Perhaps the most stunning novel I read last summer was Robert Jones, Jr., The Prophets (G.P. Putnam, 2021); it’s also a love story and a Pride Month pick. Intrigued? You should be! But the novel is particularly vivid in the ways that Jones evokes the complexity of an enslaved community, and the isolation of plantation life. I wept my way through the final pages, and you will too.
Remember, reading is a form of celebration: order one or more of these wonderful books, and join the party!
Short takes:
Jennifer Schuessler, the history reporter for The New York Times, has a banger of a piece in the paper today about the role Black librarians played in curating collections and crafting communities of African American readers. “Many were among the first Black women to attend library school, where they learned the tools and the systems of the rapidly professionalizing field,” Schuessler writes. “On the job, they learned these tools weren’t always suited to Black books and ideas, so they invented their own.” And numerous writers supported themselves through library work. Did you know that Nella Larsen, best known for her 1929 novel, Passing, was a librarian? (June 19, 2024)
Because it highlights controversy, not consensus, Juneteenth “holds greater promise for civic education” than Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, the only other federal holiday devoted to Black remembrance, writes history prof Tobin Miller Shearer at Time magazine. “Historians have long argued that the practice of democracy requires not only a civically educated populace but a body politic knowledgeable about its successes and failures,” Shearer continues. “If the way forward for U.S. democracy involves such literacy, Juneteenth celebrations—more so than the now blunted King holiday—appear to be an incubator for what that racially conscious literacy might entail.” (June 19, 2024)
The Jubilee celebrations that would coalesce as Juneteenth actually began in 1864 Louisiana, a state that fell to the Union early in the war. That summer, “Newly freed New Orleanians gathered in mass public meetings—celebrations, parades, church services, and displays of Black arts and sciences—of the kind that had been banned under slavery,” Susannah J. Ural and Ann Marsh Daly write at The Atlantic. “Each gathering brought together the city’s Black community—the recently emancipated and those already free—to celebrate a future of citizenship, sacrifice, learning, and social advancement. In doing so, they showed themselves and the wider world that they were a united community, ready to protect their families, demand economic justice, and claim their rightful place as citizens.” (June 17, 2024)